Inside accounts of interrogation approval differ

FILE - This undated file photo provided by U.S. Central Command, shows Abu Zubaydah, date and location unknown. A new document indicates the CIA first proposed to top Bush administration officials in mid-May 2002 that alleged al-Qaida terrorist Abu Zubaydah be submitted to waterboarding. That was three months before the U.S. Justice Department approved the interrogation technique in a secret legal opinion. (AP Photo/U.S. Central Command, File)
— AP

FILE - This undated file photo provided by U.S. Central Command, shows Abu Zubaydah, date and location unknown. A new document indicates the CIA first proposed to top Bush administration officials in mid-May 2002 that alleged al-Qaida terrorist Abu Zubaydah be submitted to waterboarding. That was three months before the U.S. Justice Department approved the interrogation technique in a secret legal opinion. (AP Photo/U.S. Central Command, File)
/ AP

Days after that, the waterboarding of Abu Zubayda began. He would undergo the technique, now deemed torture by Attorney General Eric Holder, 83 times that month.

The CIA adapted the proposed methods from those used in military survival school, which conducts intense mock interrogations to prepare armed forces personnel for possible capture. The Joint Personnel Recovery Agency trained CIA officers in the methods in the spring of 2002. The methods are drawn from American prisoners of war real-life experiences at the hands of Communist Chinese, North Korean and Vietnamese interrogators.

Almost simultaneously to the NSC's decision to approve harsh interrogations, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency had sent a memo to the Pentagon's general counsel's office outlining the methods that would come to be used in CIA interrogations, including waterboarding, slamming detainees into walls, stress positions, and dousing detainees with cold water.

The memo said the methods "may be very effective in inducing learned helplessness and 'breaking'" detainees' "will to resist."

But in a separate attachment, the training officials told Pentagon lawyers that harsh physical techniques could backfire by making prisoners more resistant. They also said that if the use physical methods on prisoners were discovered, the public and political backlash would be "intolerable."

The attachments were included in the Senate Armed Services Committee's release of documents and in a fuller copy obtained Saturday by the AP.

They also warned that harsh techniques cast into doubt the reliability of the information gleaned during the interrogation.

"A subject in extreme pain may provide an answer, any answer or many answers in order to get the pain to stop," the training officials said in their memo.

The attachment also discussed the fact that using extreme physical and psychological coercion – with the word extreme underlined to differentiate from the methods used in survival training – would constitute torture.

It is unclear whether Rice, Tenet or others on the NSC or at the CIA saw that memo and its warnings against using extreme methods.

Some Democrats in Congress are pressing for the creation of an independent commission to investigate the interrogation program, which could lead to prosecutions for violations of anti-torture laws.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee in September 2002, said she was not informed back then that the CIA methods had been used on prisoners.

But former CIA Director Porter Goss disputed that Saturday in an opinion piece in the Washington Post. Goss was at the time chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and received the same briefings.

Goss wrote he was "slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as 'waterboarding' were never mentioned."